Teenage Girls, Female Friendship and the Making of the Sexual Revolution in England, 1950–1980

Charnock, Hannah

doi:10.1017/s0018246x19000396

Cited by 10 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…In our study there were also shadows relating to sexual experience and travel. Their discovery is partly because of our openness to them, but they are mainly testimony to shifting expectations about personal fulfilment and the significance of sexual experience (Charnock, 2020) and travel (Tinkler, 2021) in the project of the self.…”

Section: Living With Youth In Later Lifementioning

confidence: 99%

Introducing ‘resonance’: Revisioning the relationship between youth and later life in women born 1939–52

Tinkler¹,

Fenton

Cruz

2022

The Sociological Review

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This article proposes ‘resonance’ as a fruitful way of conceptualising the relationship between youth and later life and reflecting on its significance: resonance is how a person’s ‘youth’ is lived with in the present of their later life. Resonance revisions youth, engaging with the complexity of its presence in the lifecourse. Relinquishing a preoccupation with continuity and linearity, youth seen from the vantage point of later life contributes fresh insights into what matters for people and how. This conceptualisation emerged from a qualitative study of women born 1939–52 which revealed that experiences attributed to the teens and early twenties have a presence in a person’s later life in ways unrecognised in established approaches, namely longitudinal life-course studies and socio-cultural approaches. These resonances are often historically inflected such that some cohorts may live with their youth in later life in ways that distinguish them from their predecessors and successors.

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Section: Living With Youth In Later Lifementioning

confidence: 99%

Introducing ‘resonance’: Revisioning the relationship between youth and later life in women born 1939–52

Tinkler¹,

Fenton

Cruz

2022

The Sociological Review

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“…Hannah Charnock argues that adolescent sexuality became 'more visible' as young people 'sought to "display" their heterosexuality' to benefit from 'the social currency associated with sexual desirability and experience'. 30 Within this shifting cultural landscape, sex could be both aspirational and anxiety-inducing for young women.…”

Section: Femininity Freshness and Changing Social Moresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Selling Shame: Feminine Hygiene Advertising and the Boundaries of Permissiveness in 1970s Britain

Payling

2022

Gender & History

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This article uses a 1972 television advertising campaign for Femfresh vaginal deodorants and the backlash against it to explore how women grappled with the permissive society in their bathrooms and living rooms. It uses women's magazines and the business archives of Femfresh to trace the popularity of vaginal deodorants in the early 1970s and show how advertising for the product played on women's fears of undesirability and shame about their bodies during a period of changing sexual mores. It details how feminist campaigners Women in Media (WiM) constructed a campaign against vaginal deodorants and how adverts for the product became linked in press coverage to trial television adverts for Lil-lets tampons, before analysing complaints made about both product categories collected by the Independent Broadcasting Authority. The contested terrain of feminine hygiene advertising adds nuance to historical understandings of debates around 'permissiveness', suggesting that, for some women, frank discussions of bodily functions were not inherently 'indecent', but rather had a correct time and place. WiM's campaign and the complaints collected illustrate how women of varying political leanings utilised conceptions of shame to exert limited control over the extent to which feminine bodies were up for public consumption in 1970s Britain.We used to go round the pharmacists and have a good laugh at the huge lines of shelves filled with these strange things which we had never heard of … foot sprays, vaginal sprays, body sprays and even throat sprays … -we couldn't believe it. Gradually they have crept all over the place but I wonder if they are all good. 1 Shortly after this woman's trip, vaginal sprays, vaginal deodorants, or intimate deodorants as they were also known, emerged on the market in the UK, hitting shelves in 1963. Brands like Femfresh, Bidex and FDS (Feminine Deodorant Spray) soon developed a range of products, from dry sprays and talcum powders to washes and tissue wipes, of which the latter could be kept in a handbag for a midday freshen up of the vulva. As the market grew and vaginal deodorants were advertised more frequently

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“…76 As Hannah Charnock has argued, '[f]or girls of the post-war generation, discussing their heterosexuality was a crucial way in which they created and expressed intimacy with their closest friends'. 77 Because young lesbians were either excluded from these conversations or had to pretend they were interested in boys to participate, their sexuality kept them at some distance from their peers.…”

Section: 'People Have Been Telling Me For Years That It Was Just a Phase': Being A Young Lesbianmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘What a Difference it was to be a Woman and not a Teenager’: Adolescent Girls’ Conceptions of Adulthood in 1960s and 1970s Britain

Tisdall

2021

Gender & History

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British working-class adolescent girls wrote about their imagined futures in thousands of essays throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Producing narratives that were intended for the eyes of teachers and researchers, these writers' attempts to reflect accepted narratives about growing up offer us a window into how wider societal ideas about adulthood were reinvented in post-war Britain. For these teenage girls, markers of adulthood remained traditional: marriage and motherhood were framed as the only route to becoming an adult woman. However, the category of adulthood itself was now conceptualised as the culmination of a series of discontinuous psychological stages of development, meaning that girls who did not achieve these goals could now be pathologised as psychologically and even biologically immature. This was especially problematic for young lesbians, who recognised that their sexual orientation both prevented them from straightforwardly conforming to heteronormative ideas of marriage and motherhood and was also identified as a 'phase' that was linked solely to adolescence. Nevertheless, these new ideas of adulthood shaped the choices of all adolescent girls, as they strove to prove that they were mature enough to no longer be defined as innately irresponsible teenagers.In 1963, a fifteen-year-old girl from St Albans, who planned to leave school within the next year, imagined what she might be like at twenty years old:It was my 20th birthday! What a difference it was to be a woman and not a teenager … a dignified young woman, thinking only of marriage and my position at work … When I was fifteen I used to drive Mum mad with all my boyfriends, the latest dances and my troublesome teenage spots. Dad used to get frantic with all the noise … But still they are happy now. 1 This teenager's account emphasised that stable adulthood would be very different from the transitional experience of adolescence; in five years' time, she would become both biologically and emotionally mature, no longer subject to the family tensions and 'teenage spots' that were characteristic of this developmental stage. Furthermore, the way that she phrased the significance of this future shift in her life was telling. While adolescent girls' lives in post-war Britain were fundamentally gendered, becoming 'a woman' and not a 'teenager' suggested that achieving adult status was contingent on

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Teenage Girls, Female Friendship and the Making of the Sexual Revolution in England, 1950–1980

Cited by 10 publications

References 26 publications

Introducing ‘resonance’: Revisioning the relationship between youth and later life in women born 1939–52

Introducing ‘resonance’: Revisioning the relationship between youth and later life in women born 1939–52

Selling Shame: Feminine Hygiene Advertising and the Boundaries of Permissiveness in 1970s Britain

‘What a Difference it was to be a Woman and not a Teenager’: Adolescent Girls’ Conceptions of Adulthood in 1960s and 1970s Britain

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